The Correspondence of Edward Lye. Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross and Amanda J. Collins. Publications of the Dictionary of Old English, 6. Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004. Pp. xxix + 411. $94.95.

Published by Owen Manning five years after Edward Lye's death in 1767, the Dictionarium Saxonico- et Gothico-Latinum was a milestone in Old English lexicography, particularly for its inclusion of Old English poetic vocabulary. Indeed, it forms an important link between earlier lexicons and Bosworth's 1838 A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language, on which the latter is chiefly based. Lye also contributed to eighteenth-century Germanic studies in England by editing and publishing, with substantial additions of his own, Junius's Etymologicum Anglicanum (1743), and Eric Benzelius's Sacrorum evangeliorum versio Gothica (1750), and he prepared a Latin translation (never published and destroyed in a fire in 1780) of the poems of MS Junius 11. This ambitious edition of The Correspondence of Edward Lye, as the editors justly claim, serves as "an introduction to his scholarly work, which needs to be evaluated in and for itself" and highlights the importance of the scholarly letter as a "medium for discussion, debate" and academic business in the eighteenth century (p. 4). While the title accurately reflects the edition's focus on Lye's correspondence, it does not do justice to the rich collection of materials contained therein. These reveal the complex interior and collaborative life and work of this important scholar and add to our growing collection of primary sources for historians of the discipline.

Kurt Olsson
University of Idaho